Eighty percent of consumers have saved their payment details online, whether on merchants’ websites or apps, indicating a willingness to get what we need and have as much of a frictionless experience as possible. Not having to enter personal, card-level and bank-level details over and over again saves time — and cements customer loyalty.
In the report, Payments And Credentials Vaults: Gauging Consumer Interest, a PYMNTS and FIS collaboration, more than 2,000 U.S. consumers said they valued the ease promised by storing payment credentials with retailers. We found that 56% of consumers have between one and 10 stored credentials, and nearly one-quarter have more than 10 credentials stored. Just 20% of consumers do not use any stored credentials. Doing so is especially prevalent in the subscription economy, where 61% of consumers recently paid for their subscriptions or online purchases using stored credentials.
And yet pain points are prevalent. We found that 55% of consumers who store payment credentials have experienced checkout disruptions, such as expired or stolen cards.
Growing Familiarity
There’s growing familiarity with payments/credentials vaults. Those vaults are the online apps that store and encrypt a consumer’s payment credentials and provide these details at the time of payment. A credentials vault, we noted in the report, also provides a single point of contact for consumers to update their personal or account information as needed — and they don’t need to interact with their merchants to do so.
As to why merchants should link to those vaults: As the PYMNTS/FIS data show, an overall 58% of all consumers are at least somewhat likely to switch to merchants that link their services to a payments and credentials vault. The willingness to switch is especially prevalent among younger consumers. Our survey showed that 44% of millennials and 43% of bridge millennials are very or extremely likely to switch merchants for this reason, but just 12% of baby boomers and seniors are as likely to switch.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
Strong data security tops the list of features that consumers say might encourage them to use a payments/credentials vault — and 77% of them say that netter security would be “very or extremely” influential in encouraging their embrace of the vault.
More than 58% also said that they’d value having multiple payment options in the mix — spanning digital wallets, BNPL and cards.
